19 July 2012

It's reveal day for the Improv Challenge. The premise of this challenge is easy: each month there are two assigned ingredients. The participants must make a recipe using both ingredients and blog about it.

This month's assigned ingredients were corn and butter. Yummy! Anything with those two ingredients has to be good. I had made some corn cakes a couple of months ago, but hadn't posted them yet because I felt they needed tweaking. This challenge gave me the perfect opportunity to do so! I added cheddar cheese to them and topped the warm cakes with butter, which immediately melted and made the best topping. Here's the recipe.

You may think it's kind of a cop-out to just put butter on top, but let me tell you, that is the best part! The first time we had these corn cakes, we didn't top them with anything and ate them dry. They were bland and just kind of "blah". The addition of the cheddar cheese certainly helped a lot, but putting melty butter on them put them over the top. We use real butter sparingly because it's so unhealthy, but this is one instance where a splurge is warranted.

I actually split this recipe and make two different batches. I make half of it as written above, and I make the other half without cheese or butter for my kids, since my little one is allergic to dairy. It really isn't that much extra work to split it in half like that.

These make a great side dish for summer grilling, and if you make them tiny, would make a great party appetizer with some kind of yummy topping. They are really quite versatile.

Stephanie from Sustainable Cooking for One chose to make this recipe when she was assigned my blog for the Secret Recipe Club in February 2013. Click on the button below to check out her post!

Check out all of the other great corn and butter recipes below, and come back next month to see what I create with tomatoes and peppers!